Be Excellent To Each Other

You're a fool! The world is ending get spending!!!

I hope all billionaires see that post.

Found a very mouldy apple at the bottom of my usual hiking bag. Yuck.

Oh, bollocks. Done it again.

Have you considered a canopy?

I have to eat loads to be sated.

Lost my kindle, and am now unable to read.

I knocked my iPad off the arm on the settee last night, and dented one corner.

Still waiting on my voucher from work.

Is this going to end like the scene in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, where you get a subscription to the Jelly Of The Month club?

I will asplode if so

BigOne just wrote a story about trying to convince woodcutters to stop chopping down trees, but they wouldn't, so she asked to see their manager and I am raising a monster.

I was away for a week or so, and when I returned my boiler was playing up, with lots of misfires and strange noises.. Had a couple of days of limited hot water and little heat. It managed to resolve itself yesterday and now (touch wood) seems to be functioning normally but I've booked a service nonetheless.

Getting angsty everytime I hear an unexpected creak however. Why don't these things have the courtesy to break down in summer, eh?

Will the council give you a free one as part of their green scheme?

No idea! Will have to look into it.

£5 a day treat: Do we have a coffee in the morning at the new coffee shop, or load up the wood burner with fuel in the living room of an evening?

Wood burner 100%.

I don't drink coffee. What time do you want me?

Wood burner, then make coffee at home

Wait no, burn the fiver (huddle round for warmth) then mash the ashes into some hot water and drink that; maybe with a splash of milk and sugar, to taste

Buy something for 5p and get the change in 20p pieces, put those coins in a sock and beat your neighbor to death with it. Assume their identity and use their house until eventually the utilities get cut off.

Buy coffee with blood stained change.

Sunderland 'Til I die marathon? Spoilers, they get relegated twice. you'll love it

I love a happy ending

Anyone else find Amazon Subscribe and save a faff. I thought the point was you get stuff delivered on a set day.

Every time I order stuff it seem to be delivered early. Which is not normally an issue as I work form home, so random deliveries can happen.

This month I realised, I was away the weekend of my delivery, so I moved the date till today. Yet amazon, kept trying to deliver early. I even phoned them on Saturday morning, saying please don't deliver earlhy, which they agreed, then still delivered on Saturday. Then I get a message on Sunday, they wanted to deliver early again, I am still not in. I spent a lot of time won chat explaining don't deliver as I am not in etc.

They agreed to reschedule, which was good. Then still delivered part of the order anyway..

Today I get a a message one of the items now can't be delivered as it damaged in the van, as it was rescheduled FFS!!



I got a £10 voucher and a free case of the drink I ordered so not too bad...

I used to have quite a few things on subscribe & save and had the same problem, although am rarely out so it wasn't an issue. However, they started putting the price up on the subscriptions without notifying me or replacing items with more expensive equivalents - felt more 'bait and switch' than 'subscribe and save'. I cancelled it all in the end. Thankfully more indie retailers do recurring deliveries now.

I think I will be looking to do the same. For the 5/10/15% saving, it is getting a faff.

I've had the prices move a lot , and then some of the stuff was not delivered for months because it was 'too warm' (i.e. it was chocolate and would melt - however that was still their excuse for not sending it last month either and they were quite happy for me to order the stuff directly without going via Subscribe and save !

I've not yet cancelled it yet because i do still get a reasonable discount on some stuff i regularly use - but its annoying - and yes they *always* deliver it days early or weeks late (last week i got a subscribe and save item that should have arrived the first week of November).

I frequently do the subscribe and save thing to order a product at a discount and then cancel the subscription after it arrives.

After it chewed through the replacement set of lifters, I now am in the market for a new washing machine and then a tumble drier.

My rig.

Hoover dynamic next, 9kg wash 8kg heat pump condensing drier.

I've found these to be a pretty efficient combo, they both have a setting that runs 1.5 hours ago you can do change over and reload in one go and get through 5 full washes in a day. Stacking them helps with the changeover efficiency also.

They have long parts warranty but I'm not sure how much that helps if you still have to pay someone to get them fixed. The drawer on the washer is a bit cosmetically damaged but still works fine, I've had to replace the plastic condensate tank once because we dropped it and it broke. Biggest issue is the scavenge pump in the drier has a bad bearing and makes a terrible noise when it kicks in due to vibration, I'm assuming it won't last forever in that state but it's been 2 years.... Shrug.

Otherwise the heat exchanger needs a good wash out every couple of weeks to get the fluff out or it starts talking longer to dry stuff.

7.5/10 but I'm not sure if there's any more resilient models out there or this is just how it be.

Lovely, ta.

C c c c combo!

Nice! If you get three they explode and disappear

Dishwasher Alpha is now out of action and thoughts are of replacing it with a wine rack. Like we store wine.

Obviously, we bought an entirely different washing machine entirely, too.

The brief period between Original Dishwasher going a little bit on fire and New Dishwasher being delivered was a bit miserable. I do not like washing dishes by hand, no sir I do not.

Dear Diary

What a month it's been.

Mrs. W. bought me a FitBit for Christmas, to help keep track of my vital signs now that I'm waiting for bypass surgery. Charged it up, tried to download the app to my phone, only to find that it won't work with Android version 6, which is what I have on my ancient Samsung, it needs version 8 or higher. So, needed a new phone. To be fair, I needed a new phone anyway, as I'm running out of RAM on the old one. We went in to the O2 shop today, to try to buy a phone, but apparently you can't pay up-front for a new phone if you're on Pay-and-Go with them, only if you're on a contract. You can buy them on-line and the one I was looking at was £179, but the nerd in O2 said we could probably get one at Currys if I wanted one today. As it was only round the corner went into Currys and got the same model for £149, but they don't have it in stock, so I'll still have to wait 3 to 5 days for it to be delivered. Even so, a £30 saving is not to be sneezed at.

Then there was the problem with my iPod Classic, that I've had for years. I used it all the time when I was driving for work. Unfortunately, my new car only has USB C sockets, so I couldn't connect the iPod. I bought a 4 socket converter to connect it (and my sat nav and dash cam), but then the car said, "You can't use USB devices on a hub, except for slow charging." There’s not even an analogue input in the car, so I can’t get around the problem that way. So, I ordered a couple of single USB C converters and had to wait a couple of days for them to arrive. Connected the iPod via one of them and the car said, "Device not supported." So that's the end of the iPod in the car.

I was thinking I’d need to buy a new music player to use in the car, but found that I can play music from my old phone via Bluetooth, so I should be able to copy everything off my iPod to a MicroSD card on the new phone.

I’d be surprised if that will be the end of these problems, but we’ll see.

Could you get a Bluetooth transmitter to plug into the ipod? I have one for my car as the Bluetooth in it is only for making calls, not playing music.

The radio has an aux in so I plug in a Bluetooth receiver and play via that. Do they do Bluetooth transmitters like that?

Dishwasher Beta is holding the line

Can you put your music on your new phone and just Bluetooth it to the car? Or Spotify playlist it?

I'm pretty sure they do, yeah - I've also seen ones that take an AUX signal and broadcast as FM (which you then tune the car radio to). Quality is variable but it works. We had to try a few different devices until we found one we were relatively happy with.

There's a lot of options but of varying levels of jankiness.



That may be easy, or a headache, depending on what software you use. I've manage to get songs off an iPod before but it was a hassle and a load of the metadata ended up squiffy.

End the end I gave up with trying to handle actual files (many of which were torrented) and specific music devices and just paid for Spotify and used my phone. Sure there are some drawbacks but boy is it convenient.

Isn't this a brand new car? Shouldn't it just do everything through Bluetooth anyway?

I suspect it has either Android Auto, Apple airplay or both.

Yeah true.

Oi gramps your iPod with its 30 pin connector can GTFF

Or plug the new phone into the car's USB c socket and use android auto for nav as well as music playback.

I'm a bit surprised Android auto can't do dash cam as well, actually.

Ah, it's not Android auto anymore is it, they've properly combined it into Maps to complete the bloat. Maybe next they'll just rename Android itself to Maps.

It worked just fine when plugged into the USB port in the company van, although the interface was a bit clunky. But things have moved on since I got that in 2018..

I could use the phone for sat nav, but I've got a perfectly good TomTom for that.

And yes, it's a brand new car and has Apple and Android playing options. I can use the Samsung Music Player on my phone via Bluetooth and control it from the car media player. I only had two songs on the phone, as I've never needed to use it before. I copied a few more song files over from iTunes on my Windows laptop last night and I can see the song names and play them, but it doesn't show the artist or album name, so as Sir T said, the meta data doesn't copy over, so I can’t select artist, albums or playlists for copied files.

A BlueTooth transmitter may be the answer, and they're not expensive, IF I want to try to continue to try to use my iPod classic, but I’d rather copy all my music on to the new phone and use that, but there’s the meta data problem to overcome. Or maybe I could copy everything on to a USB stick and play from there.

New phone arrives today, so I’ll have to have a play with it.

Thanks for all contributions.

I like the idea of having a dedicated music playing device. Do they do MP3 players with built in Bluetooth? Maybe that could be an option?

I saw Techmoan review a CD walkman with Bluetooth. Retro!